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Transcript: All In with Chris Hayes, October 16, 2020

Guests: Paul Casey, Erin Mendenhall, Quinta Jurecic, Evan Hill, Al Franken

Summary

The United States Coronavirus cases hit the highest level since the month of July. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who was in an intensive care for seven days after attending several maskless events with President Trump came out today and said, there was a false sense of security at the White House that led to people getting sick. President Trump brags about killing an Antifa activist involved in a Portland shooting. Leaked audio of Sen. Ben Sasse shows the Republican Party's frustration with President Trump.

Transcript

JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: Tonight's television premiere of The Way I See It at 10:00 p.m., Eastern, commercial free, right after Rachel Maddow right here on MSNBC. Get your tissues out. You are going to need them.

And that is tonight's REIDOUT. "ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES" starts right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST: Tonight, on ALL IN.

CHRIS CHRISTIE, FORMER GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY: I was doing it right for seven months and avoided the virus. I let my guard down for a couple of days inside the White House grounds, and it costs me in a significant way.

HAYES: 18 days until voting ends and the President's campaign of deception continues.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We are rounding the turn. I say that all the time. Some of the media doesn't like hearing it.

HAYES: Tonight, the grim reality and incontrovertible evidence of a third Coronavirus wave. Then, after Joe Biden won the popular vote on television last night, are Americans just bored with Trump's reality show?

Plus, why is the president continuing to brag about a very suspicious killing by law enforcement in Washington State? And could control of the U.S. Senate hinge on the price of soybeans in Iowa?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you very much. I might have missed it, but I don't think you answered my question. What's the breakeven price for soybeans in Iowa? You grew up on a farm. You should know this.

SEN. JONI ERNST (R-IA): I think you had asked about corn and it depends on --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I asked her corn --

ERNST: It depends on what the input.

HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. Happy Friday. There's a lot going on right now. A lot -- a lot going on politically, particularly it's 18 days to go into election. Millions of people are voting. But it has never been more clear that we are now in a third spike in Coronavirus cases in this country.

Just looking at the graphs and the Coronavirus tracking project which we use here on all on a lot, there were 68,000 new cases recorded in the United States just today. Now, to give you a sense of that, they have not been this high since July 30. That was back during that summer spike. And they are not that far from the record, the record-setting 77,000 cases earlier that month in July.

Also, 37,000 of those people have been hospitalized. And that number is as you can see there in that blue chart, the third one, is increasingly headed in the wrong direction. And of course, the deaths follow all that. 877 Americans died from Coronavirus just today. In a moment, we're going to talk to some people on the front lines. You're going to hear some headlines, and it is all going to sound maddeningly familiar.

And looking at that first spike, if you bend over backwards to be charitable to all the policymakers involved, Democrat, Republican, federal local, you could say, look, this thing was novel, and it was difficult and mistakes were made but they were made under conditions of incredible duress. I mean, we certainly did not do very well as a country. There was in competence at all levels. There was almost no testing, not enough policymakers heeded the warnings early enough to save enough lives, and more leaders should have come forward to say we mess that up badly.

Then came the second spike, a second summer spike that no other country really had. I want to be clear about this. I mean, we were really alone here. And that second spike, the one that you're looking at there, that was really born of a concerted act of political denial in which President Trump and sympathetic Republican governors push to open states in contradiction of the guidelines by the President's own CDC, right. They had checklists, and they just blew through it. And that produced predictably a spike that killed 100,000 Americans, a summer event that was unlike anywhere else in the world.

You see us there. No one really had that. People had one spike. We had two but the time we head in the fall. And the absolute best that can be said of that summer spike is that they were in denial or they were subject to wishful thinking. Well, now, here we are. We're going into the third spike. And there's nothing left to say other than the President and the Republican Party supporting him are willfully getting people killed.

They all know what they're doing at this point. There are no more excuses. They just think American lives don't have much value. And while it probably does not meet the legal threshold for criminal behavior in a -- in a deep, visceral moral sense, that is what it feels like.

Fresh off his own bout of COVID and his own cluster in the White House, today the President's reelection campaign brought him to Florida where the goal was to woo back the senior citizens that have been turning against him in troves. Donald Trump deployed his Coronavirus lies at the most vulnerable people in America indoors with only a smattering of masks telling them they are sacrificing themselves for the greater good.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: My message to American seniors today is one of optimism, confidence, and hope. Your sacrifice has not been in vain. The light at the end of the tunnel is near. We are rounding the turn. I say that all the time. Some of the media doesn't like hearing it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: If you're always rounding the turn, then things are not getting better. See how that works? Because here's what rounding the turn this time really looks like across America.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 13 more deaths from COVID-19 in South Dakota today, also we're record number of active cases, while the new number of cases, the total number tops 31,000.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And now, let's take a look at the latest. COVID numbers here in Indiana, and they are breaking records, unfortunately. State health leaders are reporting 1,960 positive cases across the state. That's the most we've had in one day beating the previous record last Friday.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Wisconsin Secretary for the Department of Health Services says the state is in a crisis responding to the coronavirus -- COVID-19 virus, adding "this is going to get worse before it gets better."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: I'm carrying out a long tradition of Republican politicians only seemingly able to understand a policy issue and it directly affects them. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who had a very serious case of Coronavirus, and was in intensive care for seven days after attending several maskless events with President Trump came out today to say I was wrong. Wear a mask.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRISTIE: And within 24 hours I went from feeling absolutely fine to being in the intensive care unit. It was a mistake. You know, I was led to believe that, you know, all the people that I was interacting with at the White House had been tested and it gave you a false sense of security. And it was a mistake.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: There was a false sense of security at the White House. That was a mistake that led to people getting sick and then being hospitalized and coming within inches of his life. Now, let's be clear, Christie saying these basic truths is essentially a repudiation of Donald Trump because that's where we're at.

In fact, I noticed this, I don't know if you did, it was incredibly creepy to me and bizarre and heartless that one of the President's most loyal advisors, right, who almost definitely got COVID from the president or someone close to him because he was advising him on the debate, was incommunicado any hospital for a week. And as far as I can tell, not one person in the White House said a single thing publicly about him. Because to do so, to talk about the close advisor to the President who is in the ICU would be to acknowledge the seriousness of the virus. And to acknowledge the seriousness of the virus is to insult dear leader Donald Trump.

But now, as their electoral fortunes look more and more dismal, we were watching some Republican officials start to create some distance between themselves and the president. But it is way, way, way too late for that. They have all brought this moment about together. And it is hard to come to any other conclusion that the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans are on their hands.

One the states with the Coronavirus again spiraling out of control is Wisconsin. Today it saw yet another record for new cases. For more from the front lines of this spike, I'm joined by Dr. Paul Casey, who serves as the medical director of the emergency department of Bellin Health in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

And, Doctor, I know you're busy, and I really appreciate you joining us tonight. Can you give us a sense of what you're seeing in your hospital?

PAUL CASEY, MEDICAL DIRECTOR, EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT, BELLIN HEALTH: So, not only my hospital, all hospitals and in Green Bay and the surrounding counties, we're seeing a marked rise in Coronavirus cases. We actually didn't really have a second wave. We are having our second wave now. We didn't have that some (AUDIO GAP) that you talked about. But we had a very small first wave. It wasn't really that dramatic, and we thought we dodged the bullet.

Now, for the last three to four weeks, we've seen a dramatic rise in Coronavirus cases that need to be admitted to the point that it's straining every single local hospital.

HAYES: What is your bed capacity like in your -- in your ICU, and ERs, and your -- and your provider capacity?

CASEY: So, the problem is our total bed capacity, it's COVID bed capacity because you have to have a special type room called a negative pressure room that treated COVID patients. So, our problem is that we're trying to do what we call coexist with COVID and treat all the patients who need routine health care, non-emergency but needed surgeries like hip surgery.

So, unlike in the spring, we have not shut down (AUDIO GAP). So, we are already very busy. And if you throw today, our COVID census was close to 40. So, our total bed capacity is 160. So, 25 percent of our hospital is filled with COVID patients. So, that puts a strain everyone else who needs routine care.

HAYES: You would share this chart with us to give us a sense of what these trend lines look in your hospital and in your area where you can just see it's really exploding. When did you -- you know, one of the things that's been maddening about this is the sort of this kind of latency between the when the fuse gets lit and when testing or hospitals realize how bad it is. When did you and your colleagues start to realize what you had on your hands in your -- in your region there?

CASEY: So, I first realized it in late September. I get a daily report concerning the number of patients that we have in the hospital and COVID-19. And I started to see that it had been running in the single digits. And I started noticing it rise in about the -- I think it was the 24th of September, I plotted the numbers on that report on that Excel spreadsheet and created that graph. So, that's when I said, oh, my goodness, look at this, we're headed for trouble. And it's continued to rise at a very steep rate.

HAYES: There was a lot of -- obviously, that that first experience that frontline healthcare workers had in March and April particularly was really overwhelming and brutal. And I talked to a lot of doctors who felt like there was no real treatment protocol, and seven months later, we have learned a lot.

But it's also the case that I -- the treatment picture, I think is not as good as maybe we were led to believe or as hopeful it might be at this point. Do you feel like you have, you know, well-tested sort of data-driven, empirically grounded treatment protocols that work?

CASEY: We actually are far better than we were in the spring. In the spring, we had nothing that had been tested. So we were using things that anecdotally could help Coronavirus, particularly hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin because there was some in vitro meaning in the test tube data that showed that these two medications could help COVID. So, early on, we were giving people those two treatments that were totally unproven.

Since then, a number of studies have come out absolutely disproving the utility of those two meds for COVID-19. There have been a number of studies that show that there are three potentially useful treatments, one is Decadron. Decadron is Dexamethasone. It's a very old steroid. There was a large trial done at Oxford University called the recovery trial that showed there was benefit for patients with an auction requirement who needed to be in the hospital. So, that's a proven treatment.

The second is remdesivir. That's an antiviral medication that also has some proven efficacy. And the third is more of an experimental treatment convalescent plasma. We're utilizing it on an emergency use authorization. We don't really know whether it works or not. Theoretically, it should work because you're taking antibodies derived from patients who've had the coronavirus and putting them back into active COVID patients. So, those are our current three main treatments.

HAYES: And we should note that two of those were used on the President himself. And the third sort of synthetic form of it essentially was, was administered to the president in his personal treatment.

Final question for you, I guess is can you see the other side of this spike from where you're sitting right now? What are you girding yourself for in the days and weeks to come?

CASEY: So, we have done local modeling in our community and we predict this current second wave will peak mid-November. So, if you look -- if you look at a bell-shaped curve, that takes the entire wave out through Christmas and New Year. So, that's what we're looking up against.

HAYES: Dr. Paul Casey who is on the front lines in the Green Bay, Wisconsin area that has one of the worst outbreaks in the country at this point in a per capita basis and doing incredibly important work, thank you for taking a little bit of time to explain what you're doing tonight. I appreciate it.

CASEY: You're quite welcome.

HAYES: The third spike of Coronavirus cases has spread across the country. It's probably the most diffuse version of this we've seen in Utah. The number of hospitalized patients shattered previous records. And joining me now is the mayor of Salt Lake City, Erin Mendenhall. Mayor, it's great to have you on. Can you tell us what things look like in your part of the country?

ERIN MENDENHALL, MAYOR, SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH: This is the most precarious situation we've been in with the pandemic since it started. Today was the highest case count for Salt Lake City and for our entire county where the majority of ICU beds are for the entire state of Utah. And our -- one of our major hospitals just a few minutes ago announced that they've reached their ICU bed capacity at about 104 percent which means that any additional beds now are basically overflow ICU and surge staff that are working overtime on hours and it's not sustainable.

HAYES: Do you have surge capacity at your disposal in that city there? You obviously have there are a lot of great doctors in that city and there's a great med school. Do you have the search capacity to extend now as it's breached?

MENDENHALL: We have the capacity but for how long? And how long can these skilled doctors, nurses continue on with these overtime hours and additional shifts? And to hear the doctor previously talking about this wave in other states looking that it may continue into the holiday season in the New Year, that's probably not sustainable.

We do have three major hospitals in this area and patients and the ICU beds kind of fluctuate among the three. So, us being at capacity and over capacity at ones definitely means that the other two are on the line and they are working together to try to make every accommodation they can.

HAYES: And I imagine your hospitals, like the hospitals in Green Bay, and unlike hospitals in in April and March are still functioning, you know, normally right. That there are scheduled surgeries and care for other folks, and they're trying to do both those things at the same time.

MENDENHALL: You know, my own mother in law was scheduled for elective surgery on her spine next week. Those elective surgeries are canceled, and some of them were able to be moved up to this week. But as you might know, our governor made a pretty dramatic shift in the way that we categorize risk and the restrictions in the state of Utah just on Tuesday.

The reality is most of the state didn't have a mask mandate, and now many, many more counties do. People are not putting the masks on and all the social situations. They wear it to work they wear to the grocery store, and they take it off to see friends and family. And that's exactly where we're seeing the spread -- the concentration of this bred happen.

HAYES: From the governors -- from sort of statewide governor perspective, do you think there's been consistent messaging and policy sufficient to mitigate the risk or do you think they're chasing the reality?

MENDENHALL: I think there has been consistent messaging. The policy has been difficult as it has been across the country. Some of the politicization around mask-wearing and around the need to restart the economy without restrictions is always part of the conversation and the context. The shift that we've just made to this COVID transmission risk which is databased, instead of a politician like me having to ask the governor to shift our color code restriction, it's all database now, which is transparent to the public, to our business owners, and is the public health officials who helped to set out those thresholds. And I think we'll be on course, to better numbers if this works.

HAYES: Do you have indoor dining or bars open in your city?

MENDENHALL: We do with the social distancing protocols. And if they can't do those, if they're smaller operations, then they aren't able to operate. But uniquely, in Utah, and in Salt Lake City, we have a lot of bars and restaurants despite what national thoughts might be. That's not been where we've been seeing this bread as I know it has been in other parts of the country. It's really with our 15 to 25-year-olds in social settings outside of establishments.

We have a 90 percent or so acceptance and use of masks when people walk into businesses in Salt Lake City. So, a pretty high mask utilization, but it's, you know, backyards and barbecues and parties at people's houses where we're seeing that spread.

HAYES: Yes, that -- family gatherings and friend gatherings, particularly indoor gatherings without masking has been a real driver of this this time around. Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, of course, we're wishing you all the best and thank you for talking with us tonight.

MENDENHALL: Thank you, Chris.

HAYES: Next, if there's one major takeaway from the two tech candidate town halls last night, it's that Trump is boring and America is pretty much over it. What that means for his re-election after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Your home will start off being valued 29 percent less than my home, yet your insurance for that home will be higher. You'll be taxed more for it. You've got to end this. That's what got me involved in politics in the first place, the thing called redlining. We can change so much that we can do so much to change the circumstances to give people a real opportunity.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Cedric, did you hear what you --

BIDEN: Oh, I'm sorry.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I was just saying, did you hear what you needed here?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think so.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK.

BIDEN: Well, there's a lot more if you want to hang around afterwards. I'll tell you more.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK.

BIDEN: But I really mean it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: You know, the benefit the townhall format last night was that Joe Biden was actually able to sort of explain his policies like his plan to help Black Americans build more wealth without being constantly interrupted by a frenzied and possibly infected debate opponent.

By the way, Biden did wind up staying after debate to speak with attendees who wanted to hear more about his plans for the country. You can see him there he hung around for nearly 30 minutes after the town hall finished. And Donald Trump, as you know, was doing his own town hall on the channels of NBC at the same time. And so while they weren't competing on the same stage, they were in a sense competing for the attention of American voters.

Well, tonight, we can report more people watch Joe. According to Nielsen more than 15 million people tuned in to see Biden on ABC last night, compared to a total of 13.5 million who watch Trump on three networks NBC, CNBC, and of course right here on MSNBC. Now, I'm sure that will not bother our ratings obsessed president to lose in the numbers to boring Joe Biden, but perhaps that's what part of this is all about.

You know, a lot of people found the Biden townhall boring in just the way we really need right now. You know, like actual substance and articulated plan for the future, no yelling and screaming. It is Trump and Trump's act, I think, that has gotten boring. Honestly, it's the same thing every single time we see him. The same lies, and the same dodges, the same attacks, and the same behavior, and it's exhausting. It's been exhausting for a long time, but it's even more exhausting now.

And last night, you know, when America the choice between that and something different, they voted with their remote controls. Quinta Jurecic is a contributing writer at the Atlantic who wrote the perfect piece on this topic. It's called the Tedium of Trump. And Quinta, what do you think about this idea of the President's act has worn thin?

QUINTA JURECIC, CONTRIBUTING WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Right. So, I think that, you know, it sounds strange to say that Trump is boring, because he's constantly producing, you know, new outrages and new things to find insane. And yet, as you say, it's really the same thing over and over again.

In real time watching last night's townhall, it really would have seemed like, you know, it's crazy. He's refusing to denounce QAnon. He's saying that, you know, putting out this crazy conspiracy theory in the world is just a retweet. And yet, that's exactly what we expect from Trump at this point, those kinds of sort of crazy ramblings.

And so, there's something new every day and yet, that newness is itself just becomes, you know, a lot of sound and fury. There's no substance to it.

HAYES: Yes. It's so -- it is totally wrote. And I thought that the ratings are fascinating to me, you know, because, you know, I work in a medium that is -- a medium that is intensely focused on tension, and it's -- there's a metric for it, its ratings. And we have to deal with that because that's our job is to deliver eyeballs and attention.

And it's striking to me that like people wanted to hear what Joe Biden had to say. And there was nothing at all like flashy or, you know, sexy in Joe Biden's presentation last night. It was -- it was pretty wonky and it was pretty understated. But the numbers don't lie in a way that I think is really interesting about what it says what Americans are sort of looking for right now.

JURECIC: Right. People are tired.

HAYES: Yes, they're really tired. And there's something about -- you know, I had a text exchange with friends last night, who are not necessarily all political junkies, and are not, you know, not big fans of Donald Trump at all. In fact, they dislike him intensely. But also, it was interesting to hear him say like, I just can't -- I'm done. I'm done watching him. I don't need to like -- to sit and watch him and do the thing he does.

And I saw some people saying that the -- we have this idea that his attention abilities are part of what his political power derives from. And I do think there's a link. And I think, to the degree that they decline, it says something about his political power.

JURECIC: I think that's right that he was -- you know, he came onto the scene in 2016 and he was offering something new, he was offering something different. And, you know, maybe that's like, if you've been watching the same old, you know, documentary show for a long time, and you switch on reality television, and it's loud and interesting, and stuff is happening, and it's exciting. And yet, if you watch that for four years, you maybe get a little bit tired, and you want to switch back to something different.

HAYES: Yes. And in fact, we see that, right. The ratings of The Apprentice went down over time. It's hard to keep reality shows going for precisely this reason. You have to keep raising the stakes to keep people's interest because there's a kind of like, addictive tolerance that gets built up to insanity.

And I also thought that the kind of -- the decency -- a lot of people talked about last night. Like, watching Joe Biden was there's a certain basic thrust of decency there that they found very soothing. I thought this interaction with a woman who's talking about her transgender child is really striking in that regard. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: The idea that an eight-year-old child or a 10-year-old child decides, you know, I decided I want to be transgender. That's what I think I'd like to be. It would make my life a lot easier. There should be zero discrimination. And so, I promise you, there is no reason to suggest that there should be any right denied your daughter or daughters, whichever one or two.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: One.

BIDEN: Your daughter, that your other daughter has a right to be and do. None, zero.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Again, it's not -- you know, as we're climbing at this point, that like we're low on the Maslow's hierarchy of political needs, like we're -- like, it's not -- that wasn't like such an incredible articulation of a vision of the fluidity of gender and choice and hierarchy in the society and how it should be dealt with from the sub rights perspective. But it was just basically decent, which has been the bet of the Biden campaign from the beginning.

JURECIC: I think that's right. And what's interesting is that, you know, I think a lot of people early on in the campaign would have looked at that campaign and said, He's not offering anything, right. He's not exciting. There's not anything new here. He's not a great policy wonk.

And yet, maybe that turns out to be exactly what people are looking for, which I think is really interesting in terms of what it says about how Trump has made politics into something that is all encompassing and just impossible to get away from, not in a way that you might want to have sort of, you know, political engagement, right. People are really taking action, incorporating politics into their lives.

But just as this kind of roar of noise that makes it impossible to think about anything else. And as you say, Biden is offering a very different vision of what the presidency looks like.

HAYES: Yes, it's like being trapped at a dinner party with an unbearable human being, like forever. That's exactly what it feels like. Quinta Jurecic, thanks so much for making time tonight.

JURECIC: Thanks.

HAYES: Next, like I was just saying, it's rare that the Trump campaign speech can surprise me anymore, but him apparently bragging about the killing of a shooting suspect at the hands of U.S. Marshals, well, that one caught me off guard. I'll explain right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Amidst a permanently insane news cycle, the President said something really incredible in this clip yesterday, which I have to say brought me up short. I'll play it for you and then explain.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: We want to go to Portland so bad. That won't take 15 minutes to set. 15 minutes. And the man that shot another innocent man -- this was an innocent man shot, killed, instantly killed, I sad, what happened? Well, we haven't arrested him. Two days, three days went by. We sent in the U.S. Marshals. It took 15 minutes and it was over. 15 minutes it was over. We got him.

They knew who he was they didn't want to arrest him and 15 minutes, that ended.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: What he's talking about is the U.S. Marshal task force that went to track down a man named Michael Rennell. There's good evidence that Rennell, an Antifa activist shot and killed a Trump supporter on August 29 in Portland, Oregon after a night of protests and counter-protests. The Portland Police did not immediately issue a warrant for Rennell's arrest. Instead, days later, a U.S. Marshals Task Force located Rennell who's staying in an apartment complex in Washington State.

The marshals moved in quickly. Now, there are some conflicting reports about what exactly happened next about whether police identified themselves or not. But what is known is that those marshals did indeed shoot and killed Michael Rennell, and the President has made the police shooting of Rennell a kind of talking point.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I put out, when are you going to go get him? And the U.S. Marshals went in to get him. And in a short period of time, they ended in a gunfight. This guy was a violent criminal.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A lot of them out there.

TRUMP: And the U.S. Marshals killed him. And I will tell you something. That's the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: That's not actually the way it has to be. It's not the way it can be. Law enforcement should not -- cannot act like a gang leaving out retribution even if it's for wanted murder. And even if you think that's just tough talk from Donald Trump, witnesses aren't so sure. One witness told The New York Times that officers came in so fast that "he initially assumed they were drug dealers gunning down a foe."

The actual facts that are putting the ground really make it look like federal agents rolled up and shot and killed this man before anyone actually tried to apprehend him. Evan Hill is a reporter in the New York Times visual investigations team will help piece together the map of what happened that day in Washington between U.S. Marshals and Michael Renell in this piece, Straight To Gunshots: How a U.S. Task Force killed an Antifa Activist.

Evan, you did great reporting on this. And in your reporting, there sort of uncomfortable ways in which your reporting tracks the way the President talks about it. But the President doesn't talk about it as an arrest apprehension. He talks about it as kind of it, as taking care of a problem, as retribution. What did -- what did your reporting indicate about that -- how this taskforce came together and what they actually did?

EVAN HILL, REPORTER, NEW YORK TIMES: So, we sent a reporter to the scene and they basically canvass this whole area and talk to everyone who lived around this incident. And what they found in talking to about 22 people is a story that really contradicts and raises a lot of doubts about what both the President and the Attorney General have said, which is that Rennell is walking out of his apartment complex where he's staying. He's heading to his car. And it's at this point, the two unmarked SUVs, no police lights, come barreling down the road toward him, stop about a foot from his bumper.

And this is the crucial moment because none of our witnesses here see that the officers warn Rennell or shout any commands before opening fire. It's essentially they stop a foot from his bumper, they jump out of their cars, and they start shooting at Rennell through the windshield of his Volkswagen with no warning. And that's according to 21 people who live in the vicinity and five eyewitnesses who are on the street.

HAYES: You've got one eyewitness there, the one who said that they thought it was a gang hit and was trying to get their kid out the line of fire, saying look, I'm all for law enforcement, I support the police, but this was -- this did not -- this did not look like a proper police procedure.

HILL: That's right. We have -- I mean, there were multiple witnesses actually who both -- who independent of each other, said that what they witnessed looked like a gang shooting or a drug deal gone bad. Unmarked SUVs with men who were wearing civilian clothes and tactical vests, although they were marked with Sheriff and police sometimes on the back of them, but indistinguishable from perhaps, again, jump out and start -- and start shooting.

And the officers themselves have offered conflicting statements to investigators who are looking into this incident. One officer says, he thinks Rennell raised the gun in the car, but two of his fellow officers say they didn't see that. Another officer says Rennell pointed a gun at them, but other officers say he only reached to his pocket.

So, when you put these details together, you get a story that's really at odds with the one put up by the Attorney General and the President.

HAYES: As folks can see, we're showing some of the sort of video visual investigation you guys put down so you can get a sort of better sense of what this looked like. These cars rolling up right to the front bumper, shooting through the windshield of Rennell's car. And we shouldn't say this. There is no question that he never fired his gun, right? He did -- he was in possession of a gun. We don't know if it's actually on him. But there is -- the president referred to a gunfight. There was no gunfight, correct?

HILL: As far as we can tell, there was no gunfight. One of the details that's unresolved is that police say that they found a bullet casing inside of his Volkswagen matching the caliber of the handgun that was in his possession. But they have no physical evidence other than that, that Rennell fired at them. There's no ricochet mark on a police vehicle. None of these officers were wounded. And none of these people who you can see in your graphic standing on the street say that Rennell fired.

HAYES: Obviously, we're a country where police officer shooting suspects happens quite frequently. A lot of those get covered, a lot of them don't get covered. What makes this different, I guess would be the question. I mean, there's -- the Marshal's Task Force is sort of a strange conception and the approach seems different. But what would you say to that question?

HILL: So, an interesting thing about this task force is that it was deputized U.S. Marshals from a variety of local agencies, sheriff's officers, police officers, even a Washington Department of Corrections officer. None of these officers had body worn cameras on them. None of them had dash cameras inside of their vehicle. There's no law enforcement video of what occurred that day which made this investigation much harder.

But I think it is, as you said, the statements by the President and his top law enforcement officer, the Attorney General afterward. Attorney General Barr said the streets of our city are safer with this violent agitator removed. And as you saw, the President said this was retribution. And frankly, these are the kinds of remarks that I was used to hearing when I was a reporter in the Middle East covering extrajudicial executions in Egypt. These are not the way that, you know, elected officials in the United States typically refer to what was meant to be ostensibly an arrest operation.

HAYES: Yes, that the streets are safer with this man removed, which was William Barr's initial press release. Evan Hill, I've been following your work for a very long time since you were reporting on the Middle East, and this is another great example of it. Thank you so much for sharing that reporting with us.

HILL: Thank you.

HAYES: Still to come, if Republicans have any hope of keeping the Senate this November, they really need to stop having such embarrassing debate performances. The Joni Ernst answer heard round Iowa after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: 18 days out and Democrats think there could be a path to Senate control in part by taking out incumbent Republicans made vulnerable by the extremely unpopular president. And nowhere is that strategy more evident than an Iowa where Joni Ernst is now polling four points behind her Democratic rival Theresa Greenfield 47 percent, 43 percent.

Last night, Senator Ernst, to burst onto the national scene, you may recall, with political ads about growing up on a farm and castrating hogs, may have had the most ouch debate moment of all the 2020. You see here, she and her opponent, Theresa Greenfield, who also grew up in a farm were both asked one of those questions that you have just got to know an I would debate. And here is how it went.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My question is as simple ag question. Theresa Greenfield, you answer first. What's the breakeven price per bushel of corn in Iowa this week?

THERESA GREENFIELD (D-IA), SENATORIAL CANDIDATE: Well, a bushel of corn is going for about $3.68 today, $3.69. And breakeven really just depends on the amount of debt someone has. I suspect there's farmers that are breaking even at that price. However, if their yields are down 50 percent, that's certainly not going to cover it for them. I'll tell you we've had a low commodity prices for too long. They've been going out of business prices.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Senator, breakeven price for soybeans for an Iowa farmer to produce.

ERNST: Yes, certainly. You know, I would like to go back to previous statement. Certainly, with what we have done on trade, we have seen significant strides forward. So the USMCA is a great example of that with our two largest trade partners Mexico and Canada. So, I am thankful that we are well on our way to correcting the situation within our trade space. And that was done with a Republican Senate and a Republican in the White House.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, thank you very much. I might have missed it but I don't think you answered my question. What's the breakeven price for soybeans in Iowa? You grew up on a farm. You should know this.

ERNST: I think he had asked about corn and it depends on --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I asked her corn --

ERNST: It depends on what the inputs are but probably about $5.50.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, you're a couple dollars off I think here because it's $10.05 so we'll move on to something else.

ERNST: And I -- and I don't think Miss Greenfield answered either.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: She actually did with the price of corn. We'd asked for the price of soybeans from you, Senator. Do you want to take another crack at it?

ERNST: No, thank you. You said, could the breakeven for corn is $10.50. I don't think that's correct.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right. That would have beans. Ron's question was soybeans to you, Ms. Greenfield --

ERNST: Or maybe I'm not hearing --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Corn to Miss Greenfield. Let's go ahead and move on to a completely different subject, party unity.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Yes. Let's do that because this is more excruciating than any stress stream I've ever had. Look, I don't make the rules. But it is something that he Ernst go from hog castrating outsider to beltway Joni in less than one full Senate term. We're going to talk about what this can mean for her race and how it fits in the larger battle in this -- for the Senate when Al Franken, former senator himself, joins me next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Senate Republicans are starting to send the signals that they're breaking with Donald Trump, but not because of anything like his governance or the eight million Americans who have gotten sick or the almost 220,000 who have died from the Coronavirus. They're mad at him because he might cost them their Senate Majority.

And so, that's how you get the conveniently leaked audio from a telephone town hall with Senator Ben Sasse held with constituents.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. BEN SASSE (R-NE): The United States now regularly sells out our allies under his leadership, the way he treats women and spends like a drunken sailor. He mocks evangelicals behind closed doors. His family is treated the presidency like a business opportunities. He's flirted with white supremacists.

I'm now looking at the possibility of a Republican bloodbath in the Senate. The debate is not going to be, you know, Ben Sasse, why were you so mean to Donald Trump, it's going to be what the heck were any of us thinking that selling a T.V. obsessed, narcissistic individual to the American people was a good idea.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Yes, what were you thinking there, Ben? He's not alone. Take senator -- North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis trying to gain ground his Democratic challenger. He's still a point behind in the most recent poll. It's a very tight race. Tillis told Politico last week, "The best check on a Biden presidency is for Republicans to have a majority in the Senate."

So they're all trying to figure out how to navigate the last few weeks of election with a president that is down nearly 10 points in the latest polling average and somehow hold on to that 10 U.S. Senate Majority. The last blue wave that swept Democrats into control of the House, Senate, and White House was 2008 when they want a supermajority in the upper chamber. One senator in a particularly hard-fought battle to be this 60th Democrat that year was Senator Al Franken who joins me now.

It's great to have you on. I have to ask you as someone that ran for office --

AL FRANKEN, FORMER SENATOR FROM MINNESOTA: Thank you, Chris.

HAYES: Yes, as someone who ran for office, just to react to the Joni Ernst moment which just I think anyone that's ever had a test or performance or forgot their lines on stage was absolutely excruciating.

FRANKEN: Well, when you represent a farm state which I did, one out of six jobs in Minnesota are tied to agriculture, you know what the commodity prices are. You have to know that. And Iowa, I'm sure the percentage is higher. And this is very important because we've seen a crash in the price because of the war with China, the trade war with China, and that is on Trump.

Every farmer I've talked to this year, whether they're with the Farm Bureau, which is a conservative group or the Farmers Union liberal group, they've all had the worst year ever. And it's because of the trade war. And we -- our biggest market was China and we lost it. And that's why it -- that's why it's $10.00 a bushel for soy and, you know, what, $4.00 now for corn.

Corn was $6.00 in 2012 and soy was $15.00, and you know that. You know thatwhen you represent a farm state. And it's amazing is it's actually just -- I mean, that is not a brain freeze. That's just not doing your homework. That's not -- that's not representing your people.

HAYES: You know, it's funny you say -- you say, representing a farm state, I think Theresa Greenfield, if I'm not mistaken, was actually used to live on the Minnesota-Iowa border. So, she's I think, might have even originally been from your state.

But one of the things that is striking about the terrain right now and the and the Biden coalition, if the polling is accurate, is that Democrats are winning over a significant number of white voters, white rural voters, white voters both with college education or without them in the greater Midwest that were the key voters that swung for Trump and gave him that very narrow Electoral College victory. What, what do you think is driving them?

FRANKEN: One of the things -- and this is especially rural voters. They love Medicaid expansion. And in 2017, when the Republicans were pushing what they were pushing on health care, I went to the reddest areas of Minnesota with Michele Bachmann, and people freaked out. And this is because with Medicaid expansion, people are covered. So, when they went to the emergency room, their care was compensated -- the hospital is compensated. Before Medicaid expansion, they had -- they had to eat that. And so, the hospitals, rural hospitals became flush with money and they expanded their scope of care. They did all kinds of great things.

Here are the last five states the vote by referendum for Medicaid expansion, Idaho, Nebraska, Utah, Oklahoma, Missouri. And why? Because -- and remember Lindsey Graham in the hearing goes like, well, we've lost these rural hospitals. That's because South Carolina is one of the very few states that hasn't signed on to Medicaid expansion.

HAYES: And that --

FRANKEN: So, this is a huge issue in rural America.

HAYES: And the health care issue more broadly -- I mean, it is striking to see the degree to which, as someone who went through the first ACA fight, meaning you, and me as a young reporter of the nation covering it, you know, it was so brutal and so contentious. And that law was underwater for so long, and there was always this sort of promise that at some point, it was going to pay some political dividends to Democrats, and some skepticism about whether that day would ever finally be here.

And now you're watching this election in the midst of a pandemic with eight million sick and 220,000 who have died, and Democrats running on the ACA.

FRANKEN: And we ran out of it in '18 because what happened was, remember, Trump said, I'm going to repeal and replace ObamaCare with something terrific. And then when it didn't happen, he said, who knew health care was complicated? And the answer was everybody but you pots. And if you listen to his answer last night, he doesn't know anything about healthcare.

HAYES: Nothing.

FRANKEN: And I don't know how many weeks ago, he said, he's going to release this in two weeks. He's had for years to come up with something and he hasn't. We won -- we picked up 41 seats in the House in '18 and it was because what the Republicans tried to do in '17 was so bad that Americans went, you know what, I really like the Affordable Care Act. I really like it.

I like the 10 essential health benefits. I like Medicaid expansion. I like that I'm covered if I have preexisting conditions. And that's why in the Coney Barrett hearings, I wish they focused on the hypocrisy and taking it to Lindsey Graham, and taking it to Tillis, and take it to Ernst who's now on judiciary on what hypocrites they are. I wish they'd been a little rougher in that, but they focus on ACA for a reason.

HAYES: They did. And so far, it looks like it's bearing political for it. Al Franken, former senator from Minnesota, it's great to have you on. Come back anytime.

FRANKEN: Well, thank you, Chris. It's great -- you do a great show.

HAYES: I appreciate that. That is ALL IN for this Friday evening. Now, make sure you stay with MSNBC tonight for a fantastic new documentary called The Way I See It, which offers an amazing inside look at Pete Souza's time as the White House photographer for both Presidents Barack Obama and Ronald -- and Ronald Reagan.

And that's going to air tonight at 10:00 p.m. right after, of course, "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" which begins right now. Good evening, Rachel.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.END

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